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Mapping Delirium Part 2

The typically Western notion of “we’re taking drugs” just reflects the delusions of power with which we approach fellow beings that are superior to us. I don’t take drugs, the drugs take me with them. And it’s not my decision whether I am swept along by it or not, but I can decide what level of humility I display toward it.

In conversation with Juha van ’t Zelfde Dread – The Dizziness of Freedom

I think it is this cognitive override by physical intelligence, or physical knowing and thinking… I am interested in that, because there I encounter my vertigo as well.

In conversation with Harald Katzmair Instigate Un-Balance

It’s always the same: the point is that on the one hand we are in danger of burning up, of evaporating, of going too fast, of dissolving, and on the other hand we are in danger of freezing, rigidifying, of becoming mummified and unable to move. Dizziness contains within it both extremes.

In order to better understand the Taumel process we decided that we should work with models on which we could analyse the course and the duration of the process and its many components, such as loss of control or paralysis.

Reenactment in Istanbul of one of Mieko Shiomi's works.

Distraction as a Landing Net? Notes on the Potential of the Amusement Park

Kathrin Wojtowicz

So the bright colors and the multifariousness of the Prater attractions were simply there to be used as a physical means to make something that always seemed new available to the visitors using them – human beings, children, and adults alike – something that always seemed new to them as they clambered down from them or came out of them, even if they were just the same old rides.

Translations of Taumel

The German expression Taumel derives from the Low German word düsig, dusel (to be dizzy) and is related to the German term Tor (fool), and the Indo-European dhwes (to breathe smoke).

On the Threshold in between Motion and Standstill.

Karoline Feyertag

How can we utilise dizziness in the sense of ‘staring into the abyss’ as a stimulus for the fundamental act of philosophising? Is it really the limit, threshold, limen and aporia that incite thinking?

The “Turning Point” of Paradoxes

Paradoxes are comparable with aporias as explained in Aristotle’s book on Topics. In another text, Aristotle concretises the problem of two opposite motions in one specific moment that is “numerically one” and “theoretically two”.

Limit and Threshold

Both notions seem crucial when thinking of the catalysts for dizziness. Reaching one’s own limit makes one dizzy. Crossing a threshold, which is understood as a symbol for ending something and beginning something new, could begin within dizziness but also end with lucidity.

Related to the notion of limit and threshold, limen opens up a slightly different semantic field. Its etymology is related to the Latin limus that means “transverse, oblique”.

The Greek word peirar means “end, limit” and peras means “end, limit, boundary”. The word a-peiron is the negation of these meanings. In Hesiod and other classical Greek texts peras mainly describes the end of the known world.

The word crisis stands for another cognate of aporia and paradox. It is related to a turning point that has to turn either one way or another.

The Greek word a-poria can be separated into its two morphemes a- and poros (“without” and “passage”). Poros has a wide range of meanings, including way out and expedient.

Swooping over BBC Broadcasting House and providing a bird’s-eye view of its rooftops, Flight was captured using a camera attached to a model remote-control helicopter.

Footnotes on the Unknown

Every day I do things that I normally do. Every second day I do things that I do not normally do. Then there are these periods in life where I sink into another state of being, a place where well-trodden ground can suddenly trigger incomprehensible responses.

Catherine Yass Conversation 1

Thoughts on Creativity

Creativity occurs on condition that new and valuable intelligibillity comes into being. There are three criteria: newness, newness of intelligibilitiy and newness of valuable intelligibility.

Catherine Yass Conversation 2

“One of my favorite boyhood things (besides lying with my face in the cracks of the dock looking into the water at the fish or lying with my face in the grass looking into the dirt at the bugs) was spinning around until I fell over and then the world would spin in the opposite direction.” Henry Hills, 2008.

Mapping Delirium Part 1

I see Taumeln - or “dizziness” - as having five dimensions: firstly there is the deliberately cultivated technique of Taumeln, or meandering, that the Socratic school practiced at the agora in Athens. Walking in a straight line leads to rigid thinking and getting stuck in tracks or a rut of some kind.

The multi-screen film and video installation High Wire was filmed in North Glasgow in 2008 at the Red Road housing estate.

Joachim Koester

Joachim Koester

Observation 3 (Time Zones)

In the film Descent, a camera was lowered through the morning mist to the ground from a crane over a massive construction site at London’s Canary Wharf. By presenting the image upside down, Catherine Yass examines perspectival distortions, disorientating slowness and the gradual pulling apart of time, space and a sense of reality.

Joachim Koester

Tarantism is a contemporary re-enactment of the tarantella dance.

Vertigo is a specific medical term used to describe the sensation of spinning without moving or having one’s surroundings spin about one.

In her film Lighthouse, Catherine Yass focuses on the structure of the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse. Situated five miles out to sea, this unoccupied building is balanced precariously on the corner of a square platform, which is in turn balanced on a single concrete post.

Wherever indeterminacy (apeiras) reigns, wherever there are no limits and no directions, whenever we are trapped, encircled or caught in inextricable bonds, it is, according to Detienne and Vernant, Metis who intervenes, who discovers stratagems, expedients, tricks, ruses, machinations, mechane and techne which allow us to move from the absence of limits to determinacy, from darkness to light. The kinship between Poros and Metis provides an indissoluble link between journey, transition, crossing, resourcefulness, expediency, techne, light and limits (peiras).

The Labyrinth of the Inner Ear

One can induce dizziness by engaging in disorientating activities such as spinning. Disequilibrium is the sensation of being off balance and is most often characterized by frequent falls in a specific direction.

Let’s merry-go-round!

The carousel – an object of yearning from childhood days. Once in motion, its centrifugal force elicited screams of joy.

My Frontier Is an Endless Wall of Points

Joachim Koester

To create or to recall?

The article “To create or to recall? Neural mechanisms underlying the generation of creative new ideas” shows the results of a study on general, creative idea generation by Mathias Benedek, Emanuel Jauk, Andreas Fink, Karl Koschutnig, Gernot Reishofer, Franz Ebner and Aljoscha C. Neubauer. They investigated brain activation during creative idea generation using a novel approach allowing spontaneous self-paced generation and expression of ideas.

Lock consists of two simultaneous film projections showing the before and after view from the deck of a tanker as it enters, docks and exits the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River.